If you were a button masher hovering the lowly -57C (with its primitive "autopilot by Fisher-Price" that works kinda like SAS1 in the -60) or if you were pressing the force trim button the whole time, then you were working harder, not smarter.
(With nighttime shipboard ops in the students' futures, I didn't think holding down the force trim button was a very wise technique to be teaching...)
It was always part of my OFT-1 and 2 brief and "leadership lab" to have CAT-1s hover for a bit and then listen for the <click, click> which invariably happened. I think the light bulb would really come on once they had to brief the AFCS system and finally "understood" why clicking the button was the opposite of helpful.
Did you guys have the 1-D (line) or 2-D (circle) MMI? I think it makes a difference.
I never came close to busting it, but it contributed to the "fragilé" feeling I had about the airframe (must be Italian). Fully articulated lends itself to manhandling.
It's a line with a carrot that moves left to right. There's a yellow block in the middle (I think it's 50%), and then another scarier red line that is the limit (66%?...I can't remember). I've seen it get close to the yellow (like maybe 40-45%), but only when doing sloped landings. You can wrap it up pretty aggressively in flight and it's not an issue.
One major issue with it is when it breaks. The center hub has to come out to reattach the pots/sensor. I've seen it happen twice, once during new hire, which was helpful to actually see how the thing was hooked up, and another time coming home at 2am with a bad vibe and the MMI just gave up and broke.